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Dear Google Mail Team

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161–170 of 269 posts

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#161

Post by massaman_yams »

c5karl wrote: post #15

I've had a problem with false positives in my spam folder for months. A large percentage of the email newsletters I subscribe to end up in my spam folder every day, and clicking Notspam doesn't help. I can Notspam a certain newsletter every day for a week, and then the next day that same newsletter will end up in my Spam folder once again. I'm starting to think that Notspam signals have no effect at an individual lev…

Dragging the message to your 'primary' inbox sends a stronger signal than 'not spam'. Maybe worth a try.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#162

Post by e12e »

austenallred wrote: post #67
dasil003 wrote: post #14

I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

I decided to do a quick check of my gmail; there were 151 emails in spam, and literally not one I would want in my inbox. It seems entirely likely that Google is weighting whether something comes from a private mail server very heavily, and Linus, being who he is, gets a lot of email from private servers. Not saying this isn't a problem, but it probably doesn't affect 99% of email users.

> Not saying this isn't a problem, but it probably doesn't affect 99% of email users.

So, with a conservative one billion email users, only 10 million users see this problem.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#163

Post by BinaryIdiot »

The false positives with GMail really sucks. Case in point literally all Microsoft emails relating to billing on some of my products simply go the spam (my credit card recently updated and I forgot to update it everywhere). So thanks to this post I noticed and can go fix it!

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#164

Post by TylerE »

detaro wrote: post #139
TylerE wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big problem I've had is that many of these are "business relationship/transactional" e-mails, which play by different rules. My address is my first name + last initial (neither of which are all that uncommon), and this is made much worse by Gmails idiotic ignoring of periods in addresses. There is a dude in Denver, CO who is absolutely convinced his e-mail address is tyler.e@gmail.com. It isn't. I'm really sick of…

Can't you just set a filter on the wrongly dotted address? Not something you should have to do, but...

I suppose I could, but I"ve seen MANY variations, and tbh there are enough mis-sends to tylere@gmail.com that it wouldn't really help.

TBH I hardly use personal e-mail these days, it's basically a bucket that receipts and confirmation gets dumped in to, in which case search works well enough. Most actual conversation is done via Facebook or IM, etc.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#165

Post by massaman_yams »

gerbal wrote: post #71
c5karl wrote: post #15

I've had a problem with false positives in my spam folder for months. A large percentage of the email newsletters I subscribe to end up in my spam folder every day, and clicking Notspam doesn't help. I can Notspam a certain newsletter every day for a week, and then the next day that same newsletter will end up in my Spam folder once again. I'm starting to think that Notspam signals have no effect at an individual lev…

Yep, Gmail's spam filters work based on the collective judgment of Gmail users. The core of your and linus' problem is a lot of people use the 'mark as spam' button as unsubscribe button for mailing lists.

That idea sounds compelling at first, but the data doesn't support it. There are plenty of email marketers who are focused on a non-technical audience (who presumably use 'mark as spam' to unsubscribe frequently) and which have no problems with spam folder placement.

There's a spectrum, and if a given sender looks considerably worse than average, they're more likely to get filtered.

If anything, if a newsletter is getting filtered, it's more likely to be the marketing manager's fault - perhaps they don't adequately monitor deliverability, or they don't test their content, or they don't use activity segmentation... etc.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#166

Post by e12e »

userbinator wrote: post #115
gerbal wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, Gmail's spam filters work based on the collective judgment of Gmail users. The core of your and linus' problem is a lot of people use the 'mark as spam' button as unsubscribe button for mailing lists.

based on the collective judgment of Gmail users I find this trend of "follow the majority" quite disturbing - it's as if they're implicitly saying that everyone should think the same way and punishing those who don't follow. What's spam to me may not be spam to you, and vice-versa. Then again, having a personalised spam filter for each user would probably consume a huge amount of resources...

Not sure why you are down-voted. Perhaps because everyone (that run their own mail) generally runs individual filtering per account. Typically spam assassin will score an email, but filtering (based on that, and other criteria) is up to the individual user (eg: by having a white-list, choosing spam score to treat as spam etc).

As mentioned further up, some scoring works well for many users, but not for all, such as marking eg: Russian/Chinese/Not-spoken-here-by-most language as spam.

I really see no reason for why Google should be so bad at classifying email as they apparently are.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#167

Post by e12e »

LukaAl wrote: post #8

Happened to me as well. Some of the eMail were just "updates" email that I like to receive but if they get lost is not a big deal. But a couple of them were very important one, and to make things worst, they were answer to email in which I was in CC. So, a colleague of mine send an email to someone and CC me. The second person answer and that mail is marked spam for me but not for the person who wrote the original eM…

Thankfully there's Hangouts, so we can all move off email... /s

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#168

Post by themartorana »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #78
austenallred wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I decided to do a quick check of my gmail; there were 151 emails in spam, and literally not one I would want in my inbox. It seems entirely likely that Google is weighting whether something comes from a private mail server very heavily, and Linus, being who he is, gets a lot of email from private servers. Not saying this isn't a problem, but it probably doesn't affect 99% of email users.

Just FYI, most spam does not even reach your spam folder.

True. We send thousands of emails a week and all of a sudden a large portion weren't even delivered. Turns out it's all DMARC and once those policies were fixed (assigned at all) the delivery denials ended.

This helped us:

https://dmarc.postmarkapp.com

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#169

Post by e12e »

tizzdogg wrote: post #150
TylerE wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big problem I've had is that many of these are "business relationship/transactional" e-mails, which play by different rules. My address is my first name + last initial (neither of which are all that uncommon), and this is made much worse by Gmails idiotic ignoring of periods in addresses. There is a dude in Denver, CO who is absolutely convinced his e-mail address is tyler.e@gmail.com. It isn't. I'm really sick of…

This happens to me all the time as well. I also have firstname.lastname@gmail.com and apparently a lot of other people seem to think they do as well. Or at least, they have firstname.lastname1@gmail.com and people easily forget to add the number. I wish there was a better way to deal with this type of situation other than constantly sending "please fix your address book" emails. Email is a broken system.

I'm not sure how you go from: Unless you have Google Apps for Business (or whatever), there are no vanity domains for gmail; to: email is a broken system?

Gmail.com is certainly broken in the sense that they want to cram 10 billion users into a single domain. It's ridiculous marketing/brand-motivated UX failure.

Since forever most mail services had a few vanity-domains, so people could get first.last@wherever.com. But no, Google doesn't want to provide email, they want to provide "Google Mail".

Apologies for the rant, but I can't stand it when big companies create problems through stupidity.

Re: Dear Google Mail Team

#170

Post by caf »

dasil003 wrote: post #14

I could see 20% false positives on spam for Linus equating to 0.1% of false positives across the board since I suspect the people emailing Linus are 200 times more likely to be running their own mail server than the general public.

The funny thing is that according to the comments, some mail from Google itself is being marked as spam.
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